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CLI

You need none of this to use llmbroker — Broker() fetches the pool itself. The two commands cover the two things llmbroker cannot do for you: get you the provider keys, and show you which models the curated lists carry.

There is no command that writes or refreshes a model list: a broker keeps its own list current by itself, and a database registry is refreshed by your application's entrypoint calling broker.sync("freetier") — see Servers & clusters.

Both ask the catalog for a fresh list first (a 10-second timeout), then the copy already fetched onto this machine, and only then the copy shipped inside the package. So offline and in a network-less CI they answer with what there is rather than failing; the bundled copy is frozen at the llmbroker release you installed, and when it comes to that the command warns about it on stderr.

env — generate a .env with the keys

llmbroker env freetier > .env

Prints a .env skeleton for the named curated model list: above each key, a hint where to get it:

# OPENROUTER_API_KEY — Create a free API key at [openrouter](https://openrouter.ai/keys).
OPENROUTER_API_KEY=

The preset name is the whole argument, so the command works the same before you have anything local and on a broker whose registry lives in a database. The presets you can name:

  • freetier — free endpoints from Groq, OpenRouter, Gemini and Z.AI

Get the keys themselves from the providers and fill them in. A broker reads the .env in its working directory automatically; an exported environment variable always wins over it. Keys do not have to live in .env at all — see API keys.

list — show what the curated lists carry

llmbroker list

One model per line and nothing written. A pool line is a model the pool routes over anonymously. A direct line is a paid model you can reach by name: the alias comes first, then the provider id, model id, base_url and api_key_ref.

pool groq-gpt-oss-120b openai/gpt-oss-120b https://api.groq.com/openai/v1 GROQ_API_KEY
direct opus anthropic claude-opus-5 https://api.anthropic.com/v1 ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

Declare the alias where you build the broker — Broker(direct=["opus"]) — and call it with broker.direct("opus"). See Direct model calls.